I want to start by saying I love steampunk lit. It tickles my technology bone. I run an after school club for middle schoolers centered around reading steampunk YA novels and doing hands on projects based on themes and technology in the book (more on that here). The first thing I want to say about these books is that I couldn’t read them fast enough. That’s not to say that they are the most amazing books ever, but rather the story was so engaging I just had to keep reading.

The characters in this series are not especially deep. In The Girl in the Steel Corset, you have four main characters who simply come to terms with unnatural and impossible things without seeming to think much about them. You’ve got one character who has had two distinct personalities her whole life and through only a few hours of “training’ begins bringing the two halves together to make an uneasy truce. One character trusts an unconscious stranger enough to bring her to his home/secret headquarters and maker her part of the crew.

When I think too hard about the characters themselves, I realize that I probably shouldn’t have liked this book as much as I did. But if you just take all the unnatural and impossible things in stride as the characters do, you get absorbed in the story. It is very fast paced and exciting. There are so many things going on, twists, explosions, myterious persons, that I forgot about the vagueness of the characters and kept turning the pages just to see what happened next.